How to Overcome Not-So-Common Articulate Snag-a-roos

So, you’ve developed a killer course. Now all you have to do is publish the sucker and put it out there for the masses, right? Most of the time it’s simple to just publish, review, and get it out there. However, sometimes you encounter fabulous technical problems —you’ll just find yourself yelling at your PC with your arms flailing in the air.

Although we all love articulate as an elearning tool, technical snag-a-roos just happen from time to time, as they do with any software. As you sit their continuing to yell at your PC, think about whether one of following snag-a-roos could be causing you to flail your hands in the air:

1. Attachment Icon Hyperlinks Go Bust

2. Slide Titles Aren’t Showing in the Navigation Panel

3. Publish Process Crashes When a Certain Slide is Reached

4. PowerPoint experienced a serious problem with the ‘articulate presenter ribbon’ add-in.

So now that you’ve looked at these snag-a-roos you nod in agreement and say to yourself: “Ah-ha! Ok, so now what?...” Well, let’s take a closer look at these 4 not-so-common articulate snag-a roos and how to overcome them.

1. Attachment Icon Hyperlinks Go Bust

So you’ve created cool icons that link to PDF attachments for your course. All of your links are working swimmingly. So go ahead and publish your course. Then you review it and find that you need to make a couple of modifications to a few slides. So you go back into your course MS Power Point file, make the changes, and re-publish.

You re-review your course and find that the PDF attachment icon links aren’t working.

You ask yourself: “What’s the deal?!” Well, if you go back into your course MS Power Point, and edit one of the PDF attachment link icons, you’ll see that the slashes of your link have gone from back slash to forward slash. The reversal of these slashes breaks the link from your icon to your designated PDF attachment.

So why’s this happening?...

After you’ve entered and saved your URL (data/downloads/myfile.pdf), MS Power Point will change the file link upon closing and re-opening your course project. So this is actually an MS Power Point flaw, not an articulate one. As much as we hate it, this is a problem that just isn’t going to go away.

So what’s the best way around this snag-aroo?

1. Just deal with it. Manually change the links as needed each time you re-open and re-save the file.

2. Don’t make your hyperlink a relative link. Make it an absolute link instead.

Example:

http://www.mediafire.com/myfiles.php/data/downloads/myfile.pdf

When opening and closing your project, MS Power Point maintains absolute links.

As much as we hate the workaround options, hopefully this flaw will be corrected in future renditions of MS Power Point, or articulate will figure out a way for Presenter to work with MS Power Point’s snag-a-roo, correcting the issue behind the scene.

* For even more info about this snag-a-roo, check out this articulate Forum Post.

2. Slide Titles Aren’t Showing in the Navigation Panel

While reviewing your course you notice that some slide titles aren’t displaying in your left hand-navigation panel. “Hmmmm… what could be causing this?...”

First things first, go back into your MS Power Point course file and check your articulate slide settings. Ensure that your slide isn’t set to hidden. If the effected slide titles are set to hidden, unhide them, save your properties and your course file, and re-publish. Now you’re slides should display without fail.

If they don’t, go back into your MS Power Point course file and check your articulate slide settings for potential tiering problems for hidden slides. A visible slide won't display if it is after a hidden slide that’s set to a higher level than it is. To correct this, make all of your slides visible, reset your slide levels, and then hide any necessary slides that you don’t want to appear in the navigation panel. When doing this, ensure that the slides you are hiding are a subset of a visible slide (the visible slide is set to a higher tier).

Example:
Slide 1: Visible: Level 1
Slide 2: Hidden: Level 2

* For even more info about this snag-a-roo, check out these articulate instructions.

3. Publish Process Crashes When a Certain Slide is Reached

Your publish process freezes up when you get to a certain slide. Everything crashes and you get error messages. You go back into your course MS Power Point and republish. It happens again. You’re thinking: “now what?!...”

Here’s the scoop on this one, if you have too many animations or animated shapes within a given sequence, the publish process can freeze up and crash. As your course is publishing, the publish processes the present slide, retains all the previously processed slides, and looks forward to the slides yet to be processed. If there are too many animations within a 3 slide sequence, then this crash will happen. In other words, it crashes because the slide that’s presently being processed is too robust – it’s working hard to not only to process this present slide and the rest of the slides, but it also needs to retain all of the previous slides that have already been processed.

So what constitutes as too many animations or animated shapes? Generally speaking, using 1-10 images per slide, and keeping the animations for these images to about 40 animation steps or less, seems to do the trick. However, many of us have 15 plus images per slide and lots of animation steps for those images.

Here’s what can be done to get around this snag-a-oo. For the slide that’s getting stuck on the publish process, and sometimes the slide immediately before it and after it, try to:

1. Simplify your animations.

Minimize the number of images on your slide, including the number of animation steps used.

2. Break apart animations into several slides.

If you want to keep your stellar robust animations, try breaking them up into 2 or more slides. some of the slides into two or more slides to even out the load.

3. Or try to Convert grouped images in to 1 single image file.

If you have a lot of group shapes or images, right-click and save your groupings as one image file (typically as a JPG or PNG file). Then try to replace your original grouping with the new single image file.

Taking any of these actions will help distribute the load for the flash player playback and should allow you to publish successfully.

* For even more info about this snag-a-roo, check out this articulate forum post.

4. PowerPoint experienced a serious problem with the ‘articulate presenter ribbon’ add-in.

You’re working happily along creating your course in your MS Power Point file. Then you receive a message that PowerPoint had a very bad problem with your Articulate ribbon add-in, and your project crashes.

“Uh-oh. What to do?...”

Usually this indicates that there was a technical issue with the latest installation or update of articulate on your PC.

To fix this problem you could just click “no” in the error message and proceed with what you were doing. But to keep it from happening again:

1. On your PC, Go to Start > Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs.
2. Double click Articulate Studio '09.
3. Select Reinstall. This will attempt to repair the installation.

After you have repaired the installation, you should be golden.

*For further information about this snag-a-roo check out this articulate forum post and resolution.

Hopefully the tips and tricks shared here will help you overcome some not-so-common Articulate snag-a-roos.